The present invention relates generally to announcements, queuing and dispatching. In particular, the present invention relates to announcements, queuing and dispatching for emergency response centers.
Emergency Response Centers (ERC) (e.g. 911) employ automated call distributors to answer, queue, and dispatch calls in the order in which they are received. With the recent proliferation of wireless phones, e.g., cellular phones, ERC""s are faced with a new challenge. In particular, when an emergency occurs there are usually numerous people with wireless phones who can report an emergency to an ERC. However, when multiple people call to report the same emergency, e.g., a fire at a particular dwelling or an accident at an intersection, the ERC""s queue becomes excessively long when compared to the number of actual unique accidents for which callers in the queue are attempting to report. This increases the xe2x80x9ccall waitingxe2x80x9d time in the queue for each caller, making it difficult for other callers to report and request help for different emergencies. For example, the first five callers in a queue may be wireless users attempting to report an automobile accident at Broadway and 42nd Street in a given city, while the sixth caller in the queue is trying to report a gas fire at a different location. Based upon known ERC queuing and dispatching mechanisms, the sixth caller will be left waiting in the queue for an available operator until one or more operators waste time with callers two through five, who were simply reporting the same emergency as the first caller in the queue.
The present invention relates to a system and method for queuing, dispatching and generating announcements for incoming calls. In particular, the present invention relates to queuing, dispatching and generating announcements for incoming calls received by an Emergency Response Center (ERC) by classifying callers based on the location from which they are calling. In accordance with an exemplary embodiment of the present invention, if the ERC receives a call which originates near a known emergency, the call may be placed in a low priority position in the ERC""s queue or the ERC may simply provide a pre-recorded announcement indicating to the caller the reported emergency(ies) near the location of the caller, thus providing the caller with the option of hanging-up and relieving the ERC""s queue if the emergency has already been reported. This embodiment provides the technical advantage that callers from unique locations will be serviced before callers from known emergency locations. This is unlike conventional systems where callers are placed in the queue solely based upon the first to call.